Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

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Summary: astounding, evocative and transcendent memoir
Review: Oooooooo-eeee. I cannot tell you the number of times you will pause while reading this extraordinarily sensitive and profoundly moving life-story. Some of your pauses will feature your face wreathed in smiles, for Janisse Ray's "Ecology of a Cracker Childhood" is a celebration of both place and family, and her finely-delineated family sketches and gloriously-rendered anecdotes and teeming with respect and affection for her family. Other pauses will find you, I am sure, hands on knees, weeping. For there is great pain in this book as well...the pain of a place that is gradually disappearing, the pain of understanding your place in that place, the pain of coming to grips with the flaws of your heritage.

One reviewer, Wes Jackson, said, "Janisse Ray is a role model for countless future rural writers to come." I believe that he understates Ms. Ray's importance. To tell the truth, she is a role model, plain and simple. It is my hope that this stirring memoir will vault her into our nation's consciousness and conscience. This daughter of a Cracker junkyard owner has a significant message to tell us, and her language is simply remarkable. Her verbal imagery is astounding; her precise descriptions -- of humans, flora and fauna -- are models of elegance.

I am willing to bet that there are more than a few readers who could only imagine the possible union of Ms. Ray and Rick Bragg ("All Over but the Shoutin'"). These two white Southerners have much to teach us about family, conscience, commitments and reverence of place.

"Ecology of a Cracker Childhood" will emerge as one of our century's most important works. Be glad to have read it when it first came out.

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Summary: Growing up in the longleaf pine forest
Review: Ray has written an interesting mix of memoir and nature book in Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. She shows us growing up in the 60's and 70's in the rural, poor southeast corner of Georgia, where amongst a rolling junkyard of old machines, and surrounded by a vast array of characters, she and her family eked out a simple, and relatively comfortable existence. What helps make this book unique is the positive ness of it - Ray is not telling stories looking back and showing why she left the area when she could. Nor is she breaking our hearts with stories of hardship, violence or innocence lost that so many stories of poor country upbringing. Instead, it is a collection of wry and emotional stories of her life, interspersed with stories about the beloved longleaf pine forest. Surprising this alternating flows naturally, and is not as jarring as one would expect. In fact, her passion for the forest intertwines with her passion for life, and for her family. The essential conflict of the biography does not involve her really, it involves the forest's fight to survive in the face of cutting and tree farming, and the encroachment of civilization. A fine book with a point that does not hit you over the head with this message. Rather she beautifully entwines growing up with growing up with nature. It's a shame if we let her world disappear. An excellent and enjoyable read.

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Summary: Stories are good, but I didn't want a textbook
Review: Ray is an excellent story teller, and her tales of her childhood are amusing, clever, and sometimes thought provoking. The chapters alternate between a childhood memory and a description of a segment of the longleaf pine forest ecosystem. In the beginning of the book, these descriptive chapters are interesting and tie in with the previous story. However, as the book goes on, these chapters become drier and less enjoyable, and eventually begin to sound like high school research papers. The following is a direct quote of the beginning of one of these chapters:

"Another bird distressed by the diminishment of longleaf pine forests is the Bachman's sparrow, small and nonmigratory, a bird so suited to open pine savannas with little to no understory that it has been unable to adapt to dense pine monoculture. Since the 1930's it has declined at a stunning rate. Bird-artist John James Audubon discovered the sparrow in 1832 while exploring near Charleston, South Carolina, and named it for a Lutheran minister he had befriended on the street and with whom he was staying, John Bachman."

Ray has researched her subjects and is good at explaining biology. However, that was not what I was expecting in a book labeled as "...tells how a childhood spent in rural isolation grew into a passion to save he almost vanished longleaf pine ecosystem that once covered the South." (Back Cover - Ecology of a Cracker Childhood)

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Summary: The trees do sing ...
Review: The book touches hearts. She is honest about a difficult subject, her father's illness, and she tells his story with gentle love. She loves her land, and her trees do sing, as do her words and feelings. Her love for her family, for her piece of the earth, and our pieces of the earth shine through everything she writes in this book.

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Summary: I Felt Like a Child Again
Review: The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood By Janisse Ray

"The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood" is a delightful book, beautifully written and filled with wisdom. Janisse Ray made me feel like a child again. What it is like to have a soul of a poet and live in a junkyard in rural Georgia with a family of fundamentalists. Her love for South Georgia's vanishing natural beauty and history is infectious. She beautifully illustrates, through the story of the long leaf pine, that in saving our ecosystem we save ourselves.

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Summary: Saved my life
Review: This book changed my life and saved numerous trees from being cut.

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Summary: A Must Read for those of the Deep South
Review: This book had the same impact on me as Rachel Carson's SILENT SPRING, but even more so, because ECOLOGY OF A CRACKER CHILDHOOD takes place in my own backyard.

Ray blends nature history with the story of her life, and you become aware that she really is a "child of the pines". Selected as the Best Non-Fiction Book of 2000 by Southern Book Critics Circle, ECOLOGY OF A CRACKER CHILDHOOD should be required reading in Georgia high schools.

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Summary: Heaven On Earth
Review: This book has one particular section titled "Heaven on Earth," which avidly depicts the sublime religious influences that faith and church can have on young low-income Americans, and how their view of God and Church can become more depicted by those around them than by actual mature thought. This book was a required reading for my college level English course, and I would suggest it to any student of English or Culture.

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Summary: An Exceptional Memoir
Review: this book is a must for any Southerner and for anyone interested in the environment. Though I was born and raised in Georgia I was ignorant of the ecology of the longleaf pine forests. And though I have often drive through the region described in the book I knew nothing about the people there. The book alternates between a memoir of Ray's family and upbringing and lyrical descriptions of the land in which they lived. She also tells the story of the magnificent pine forests which grew from Virginia to Mississippi and which are almost nonexistent today. There are many books today about "my childhood" but this is far superior to any I have read with the exception of Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club." It will be of interest to environmentalists and lovers of good writing alike.

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Summary: Janisse Ray Has a Southern Soul
Review: This is a truly delightful book. Readers reared in the southern coastal plains of Georgia can especially relate to Ms. Ray's life in the small town of Baxley, Ga. She does a really brilliant job of interweaving the sadness of the failure of man to protect the pristine environment of the once productive southern farmland.

The stories of her life growing up on the junkyard as a member of a dysfunctional family never once leads the reader to feel sorry for her. Indeed, she seems to glorify her life and enjoys telling the story in an easy and folksy sort of way that runs the gauntlet from sadness to frolic and lends those emotions to the reader, plus many more often difficult to describe.

It is a book to be savored. One to read now, and again later after you have surveyed for yourself the world she longingly dreams of.